Fog City Magic Fest: Not your grandparents’ magic

Lynx the Animator bites down on a sword for a portrait at the Exit Theatre on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2017 in San Francisco, Calif. He is performing at the second-annual Fog City Magic Fest taking place at the theatre Jan. 25-28. less

Lynx the Animator bites down on a sword for a portrait at the Exit Theatre on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2017 in San Francisco, Calif. He is performing at the second-annual Fog City Magic Fest taking place at the ... more

Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle

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Ryan Kane is performing at the second annual Fog City Magic Fest.

Ryan Kane is performing at the second annual Fog City Magic Fest.

Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle

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Jay Alexander springs his deck of cards at the Exit Theatre.

Jay Alexander springs his deck of cards at the Exit Theatre.

Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle

Fog City Magic Fest: Not your grandparents’ magic

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Lynx the Animator pulls no rabbits out of hats.

That cliche, along with its cheesy, childish connotations, “is something all magicians are trying to break,” says the local magician and street performer, 43. “It’s an outdated concept. I really do want to kill the guy who put that image together.”

Lynx, for one, specializes in sword swallowing, among other effects. None of his fellow performers in the second annual Fog City Magic Fest, Wednesday-Saturday, Jan. 25-28, at the Exit Theatre, conform to the magician stereotype, yet they all contend with the expectation that they will.

Well, almost all of them. Fellow Fog City Magic Fest performer Jade, as a female magician, is a relative rarity. “More often than not, whenever anybody says ‘magician,’ immediately they will think of a white man,” she says. This was at a group interview at the Exit with Lynx, as well as other Fog City Magic Fest performers Jay Alexander and Ryan Kane.

One of Jade’s career goals is “to contribute something to changing that expectation.” In some ways, she already has. In 1990, she was the first woman to win the International Brotherhood of Magicians’ Gold Medal of Magic, an award that doesn’t even get presented every year. (Often, no one is deemed good enough.)

For now, though, she still benefits from audiences not knowing what to expect from her act, which uses magic rings, a ribbon wand and a disappearing box, among other effects. As a result, audiences are more welcoming of her. “They’re just along for the ride,” she says.

Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle

Top: Jay Alexander springs a deck of cards at the Exit Theatre, home of the Fog City Magic Fest. Above: Jade is the first woman to win the Gold Medal of Magic.

Top: Jay Alexander springs a deck of cards at the Exit Theatre,...

For the men, says Kane, 27, “your first 10 minutes onstage are always just proving ‘everything you expected tonight, I’m not that.’”

Alexander, 47, says at first, especially at corporate magic shows, it can be as if half the audience members have their arms crossed, as if to say, “OK, fool me.” Some audiences, of course, resent that magicians can fool them, but that’s an absurd attitude, Kane points out: “I started work on this 21 years ago, and you just started. Why on Earth should you expect yourself to figure this out?”

Complicating popular notions of magic and magicians is part of what led Alexander to co-found the festival with local performer Christian Cagigal last year. “All of us are so different,” he says. “That’s what the festival to me is about: celebrating the diversity of what magic can be.”

One of Alexander’s specialties is card tricks, and just in shuffling from one hand to the other for a photo, he coaxes from them a sound that no inanimate object should be able to make. Kane uses a lot of comedy; he even considered careers in stand-up comedy or theater before choosing magic as his medium.

A magic show doesn’t need that much to be a magic show, Kane says. Performing a trick successfully is a “low bar to clear. That allows me to do anything else I want with that, so I can be funny one moment, be poignant the next. I can be pretty or beautiful another moment. It allows me a lot of freedom to explore whatever I want to do and not be confined to comedian or musician, where everything has to be one thing. And that’s also added onto blowing someone’s mind with something impossible.”

Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle

Ryan Kane points his paintball marker.

Ryan Kane points his paintball marker.

Fog City Magic Fest acts also vary by scale. Joe Culpepper, 37, of Montreal is one of the few out-of-towners to participate, though he grew up in Sacramento. His act, “Magic for One,” is just what it sounds like: a one-on-one magic show, each lasting five minutes, of what in the industry is called “close-up” magic. (The other kinds, he says, are street, parlor and stage.)

“It’s not economically very smart,” he jokes, over the phone. “You don’t sell a huge number of tickets. This is an artistic, poetic experiment.” He’s drawn to close-up magic in part because audiences can’t then attribute a magician’s success to being too far away to see how the sleight of hand is accomplished.

But he also likes how special it feels. He remembers, as a kid, “going to see a magic show and being the kid who stayed after the show.” If he followed the magician outside, the performer would often say something like, “You know what, let me show you one more. Let me show you one thing I don’t usually do.”

“That performance,” Culpepper says, “even though it’s something in this person’s repertoire, that they’ve lavished many hours perfecting, in that moment, it feels like it’s just for you. When you have someone who does a performance just for you, it’s a different type of gift.”

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In today’s world, he says, “we are so distanced from each other. So many of our storytelling experiences are mediated through screens nowadays. There’s a real nostalgia or sense of loss for these intimate experiences.”

Even if San Franciscans can be glued to their screens, the Fog City Magic Fest performers agree that, counterintuitively, our region, with its wealth of engineers, makes for great audiences to magic shows.

“The weird thing is, the smarter the person is, the easier (it is) to fool them,” says Alexander. “The more a scientific mind they have, they’re usually looking at it completely wrong.”

“They take a more complicated path to the solution,” Jade concurs. “If they’re a physicist, they are going to go through all the things, all the trainings they’ve had, but you do it for a child, they will go straight to the source.”